Crane scheduling at transshipment yards

Freight container transportation has been growing steadily in the last year, because containers are standardized transport units and allow significant savings on handling cost and time. We will consider scheduling of several cranes at rail transshipment yards, in which gantry cranes move containers between trains, trucks and a storage area. In particular, we will discuss the two-way bounded dynamic programming (TBDP) approach that my co-authors and me propose for solving this crane scheduling problem. TBDP has been designed to deal with situations, when it takes long to evaluate the value function in the state graph of dynamic programming; it provides sharp bounds early in the solution process and identifies critical subproblems, i.e. states and transition arcs, for which the value function has to be estimated.

As a visiting fellow staying at Université de Montréal till the end of July, I will also share some open questions from my research looking for your feedback and possible collaboration.

Jun 16, 2017 10:30 AM
–
12:00 PM

GERAD

GERAD is a multi university research center founded in 1979, financed by FRQNT.
It involves some seventy experts from a mix of disciplines: quantitative methods for management, operations researchers, computer scientists, mathematicians and mathematical engineers, from HEC Montréal, Polytechnique Montréal, McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal.